


sebastian (or, the confession of a troubled boy-child)

by Wagandea



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - 1940s, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dominant Ciel Phantomhive, Dubious Consent, Grooming, Hebephilia, Inspired by Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov), M/M, Obsession, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Ciel Phantomhive, References to Oscar Wilde, Submissive Sebastian Michaelis, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-03-20 14:44:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18994705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagandea/pseuds/Wagandea
Summary: Ciel is a willful child, a magnificent brat, altogether a lost cause. To the misfortune of his new tutor, Sebastian Michaelis, Ciel is also immediately and uncompromisingly infatuated with him.Obsession is a funny thing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few thank yous: To Ollie and Hobie, for holding my hand through the planning and writing process of this monster, and to nighttime_tea_party whose fic [Ciel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7303621/chapters/16588006) was a major inspiration.
> 
> This fic is divergent from Lolita, taking mostly the skeleton of it to twist around for my own use. You don't have to have read the novel to read this!
> 
> Note that the character named Liu in this fic is Lau, I've just gone with the more proper romanization of his name instead.
> 
> (If you'd like to keep up with my fic ramblings, you can find me on [tumblr](https://wagandea.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/celestewritings)!)

Ciel’s tutor is a private and solitary man. He is pensive, dark-haired, and bespectacled, with the echo of good humour folded deceptively into the lines around his rust-colored eyes. He is serious at all times, stands six foot two in his dress shoes, and is devastatingly handsome; or so Ciel has surmised from eavesdropping on his aunt’s conversations with Mr. Liu. Certainly, he wouldn’t know himself.

He is Mr. Michaelis in the mornings when he conducts Ciel’s lessons, and just Michaelis in the afternoons when he speaks with Aunt Angelina over the Sunday paper. He is nameless and formless in the evenings once he has shut himself in his rented room on the third floor to write his poetry or _whatever_ it is he keeps in that dog-eared leather journal.

He is Sebastian when Ciel learns his Christian name through way of snooping through Angelina’s letters two weeks after the man takes up residence in the house, and he remains Sebastian forever thereafter.

“Sebastian.” _Se-bas-ti-an_. A mouthful of syllables, deliberately enforced on Ciel’s lips with the elegance that only the lilt a proper accent can afford. He draws the vowels out, holds them captive in his mouth, and lets them go with the pointed lift of one eyebrow.

Michaelis caps his fountain pen, shuts the cover of his journal (he _always_ shuts it, the perfect lines of his script never visible for a moment long enough to read), and turns away from his writing desk. “Ciel.” And Ciel sighs and melts against the door-frame, though in his practised attitude it comes off more as a huff of impatience. His name on Sebastian’s ( _Se-bas-ti-an’s_ ) lips, spoken in turn and effortlessly offered, makes certain feelings rise in him that he cannot readily identify. “What can I do for you?”

“I want a cup of tea. I don’t know how to use the kettle.” This is, of course, a lie. His eyelids flutter half closed, and he stretches out in the doorway, small chest puffed out in a show of self-importance. “Do it for me.”

And so goes the _actual_ job Sebastian Michaelis is expected to perform. Ciel is a _troubled_ child, which is the kindest way he has heard himself described.

But then, no one can blame him. What do you do with a boy like that? And poor widowed Angelina Dalles, having to mind her orphaned nephew after never having kids of her own. She does the sensible thing and sends him away to boarding school, only for Ciel to be sent back home after half a term for fighting with the other boys. (They hit him first, Ciel insists, though no one ever believes him.)

She hires a live-in tutor for a generous wage and a cheap room, and leaves Ciel to his own devices which naturally means the poor woman is tasked with the significantly less glamorous job of _babysitter._  She quits within three months.

Ciel has been through fifteen tutors in the three years since falling under his aunt’s care, and Mr. Michaelis, he is certain with a misplaced sort of vindictiveness, will not be the last.

“It can’t be helped, I suppose.” And Michaelis locks the journal in the top right desk drawer, graciously rises from his writing desk and descends the steps from the third floor without a single complaint, verbal or otherwise. Ciel trails after him, uncertain whether to be irritated or placated.

Michaelis is a strange man, and unlike the ones who came before him. He dresses in all black save for the stark white contrast of his collar and shirtsleeves, even in the oppressive summer heat, as though he is a man in mourning. He is not, as Ciel presumed, widowed like Aunt Angelina, and in fact has been a confirmed bachelor for the entire thirty-one years of his life. This Ciel learns from needling him in an unnecessarily aggressive fashion about the man’s personal life over the kettle.

His degree is in English, though he seems familiar with any subject that can be thrown at him and handles Ciel’s mathematics and science lessons with as much ease. He published a detective novel under a pseudonym (Jeremy Rathbone) back home, and has been in America just shy of two months (his accent is crisp and familiar like Ciel’s rather than faded and Americanized like Aunt Angelina’s). This is roughly the amount of information he is able to interrogate from his quarry, for when he asks what brought Michaelis to America the kettle announces itself. Michaelis swiftly takes advantage of the pause in conversation to ask Ciel about _his_ personal life, and Ciel reluctantly concedes defeat under the muted smile in Michaelis’s knowing eyes.

The tea steeps in sulking silence, and Michaelis busies himself with washing the dishes in the sink, despite the fact that Angelina keeps a maid. He likes to keep his hands busy lest the boredom sets in, Michaelis explains, taking far too much pleasure in lowly housekeeping, and Ciel rolls his eye from his seat at the kitchen table.

But where Michaelis excels in the speed and efficiency with which he happily complies with Ciel’s whims, he is lacking in the final result. The tea, as it turns out, is terrible even with a _liberal_ amount of sugar stirred in.

Ciel does not hesitate to tell him as much: “Do not ever serve me something so disgusting again.” And proceeds to dump his entire teacup, complete with the sticky sludge of not quite dissolved sugar at the bottom, out onto the white tablecloth.

With distinct satisfaction, he senses the minute twitch in Michaelis’s brow and slight hardening of his expression. To elicit a visceral emotion from the man, however well restrained, is certain to put Ciel in high spirits for a few hours; and he swiftly excuses himself to his bedroom without another word, leaving Michaelis to dutifully clean up the mess in the kitchen.

 

♚♚♚

 

His victory proves short-lived. Michaelis still begins to leave his door open in the evenings, and Ciel still finds himself curiously drawn into whatever trap awaits him over the threshold. He is not cautious in his exploration, though at the beginning he is satisfied to stretch out, catlike, in the doorway and demand this or that.

The fourth cup of tea proves to be drinkable, if not enjoyable, and the following evening finds Ciel striding curiously around the occupied bedroom on his next nighttime visit, no request in hand.

A few observations (for Ciel has a curiously keen memory and a critical eye for detail) about the personal lodgings of Mr. Michaelis, that one safehold in the house away from the influence of Madame Red:

One. His clothes are indeed, _all_ black, as a curious peek in his wardrobe while the room’s renter is absorbed in a particular passage of his book, readily confirms.

Two. He has very little in the way of personal effects, but keeps an impressive amount of books, of which most are the classics.

Three. The room is kept exceptionally dark. In the evenings, sitting at his writing desk as ever, he seems to prefer the company of candles rather than the convenient electric fixtures.

Four. Michaelis’s cologne is resinous and immediately contradictory to what Ciel knows of him. Frankincense and myrrh, the faint sweet undertone of beeswax candles just blown out, and a coiling trail of smoke. It makes his person and his room smell of an antique church, the sort found readily back home in England; and though Ciel cannot explain why just yet, he feels inexplicably as though he’s rather walked into the devil’s lair.

That is not to say he doesn’t feel at ease in this room, dusty and darkly sacred. When Ciel grows bored of his snooping, he settles at the arm of Michaelis’s chair and stares boldly down at the book he’s been enthralled with (or pretended to be enthralled with - he hasn’t turned a page since Ciel stepped foot over the threshold). “ _You will always be fond of me,_ ” some nameless character Ciel is unfamiliar with claims on a yellowed page some third of the way through the book, “ _I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit._ ” Michaelis’s cologne has gone to his head, imprinted in his memory so vividly that some decades down the line he might remember it with the distinct clarity of this moment; should small, frail, thirteen-year-old Ciel Phantomhive manage to live that long.

“Your book,” he asks after a few moments, with the haughty sort of disinterested interest all too-independent children pick up around this age, “what is it?” And his bony shoulder presses into Michaelis’s cold shirtsleeves as the tutor’s hand, thin-palmed and long-fingered, alights just barely at Ciel’s hip under the pretext of keeping him steady in his half perch on the arm of the chair.

Michaelis relates to him, in friendly terms rather than academic ones (as though discussing literature with a colleague rather than his student), the premise of Oscar Wilde’s famous novel.

In summary: A beautiful young man (“How old?” Ciel prompts), the titular Dorian Gray, has his portrait painted by his dear friend Basil Hallward, who is quite taken with both Dorian and the portrait (Michaelis’s words). Through the influence of another mutual friend, Lord Henry, Dorian with his youth and beauty, embarks on a life of debauchery (Ciel scoffs), and finds that the portrait ages in his stead.

“I don’t suppose an explanation is provided for _why._ ” Ciel feigns boredom, even as he cocks his hip out to the left, where Michaelis’s hand has settled along the high waistband of his shorts. He makes a habit of being critical of all things, and anyway his encounter with _literature_ has been a short and decidedly unpassionate affair. He far prefers text-books of the more technical sort for light reading.

In the dark and the flickering candlelight, Michaelis’s white teeth look too sharp, but his expression is ever kind. ”One could argue he makes a deal with the Devil.” There is a strange scar on the back of Michaelis’s left hand, where it rests on Ciel’s hip. The shadow around his red-ish eyes is languid and pronounced. He carries with him at all times the look of a man hiding some terrible secret.

“That is an acceptable solution,” Ciel acquiesces after a minute of consideration, and follows it closely with a joke, the sort of deadpan straightly delivered joke one can only tell is a joke because of the way his brows travel mildly up his forehead: “Perhaps I ought to get my portrait painted.”

Michaelis’s shirtsleeves are cold, but the palm of his hand is hot. It threatens to burn through the thin cotton layers of his summer shorts and shirt even as Ciel merely leans against him, unmoving.

“Ah.” Michaelis folds easily and willingly into the skin of poor, tortured Basil Hallward, who is _quite taken_ with his young muse. “I’m afraid I’m not much of a painter.” Apologetic, but with the uncharacteristically playful hint of a smile around the corners of his lips. Ciel scowls automatically in response, but does not separate himself from Michaelis’s touch.

“Write a ridiculous poem about me, then. Aunt Angelina said you were a poet.” He is always demanding, always commanding.

“If I couldn’t compose a simple poem for my lovely student, what sort of tutor would I be?” And when he teases Ciel it is light and too familiar. For just a moment, before he lifts his hand from Ciel’s hip, Ciel is afraid (anticipating?) Michaelis might lean left to press a fatherly kiss to his cheek, his forehead.

“Don’t disappoint me, Sebastian.” (Se-bas-ti-an!)

He is sent to his own room with the excuse of Michaelis needing to get some much needed sleep (a lie; Michaelis sleeps less than even Ciel does, and at night he ever hears the man’s footsteps pacing restlessly through the house, up and down the two flights of stairs, pausing on the third landing outside his own bedroom door and then Ciel’s), but Michaelis leaves the worn and well-read novel with Ciel as a consolation.

Ciel stays up much of the night reading the novel, and falls asleep early in the morning to Wilde’s lines echoing around in his head. (“ _The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,_ ” and _"s_ _ome things are more precious because they don’t last long"_  and many many more.) He is inexplicably comforted by the tap-tap-tapping of footsteps on the landing outside his door, and for those few hours sleeps more soundly than he has at any point in the last three pitiful years.

 

* * *

 

                    **one.**

_Were I a romantic, I might write that it was love at first sight, and next sight, and every sight thereafter. But I was not cut out to be a poet, I never did have the artistic flair for it, and regardless: My memory escapes me. I cannot recall if, even then, I ever did love him._

_I remember the star-cut sky on the front lawn, after midnight when my Aunt introduced us because your train had been delayed most of the day. You were wearing a black coat with silver buttons and a glove on your left hand. You smiled at me, and your round spectacles slipped down your straight nose. I forgot your name, after that brief introduction (as I was promptly hurried to bed in my nightcoat, and was generally disgruntled at the arrival of a new tutor), until I heard my Aunt address you again the next morning as Michaelis. You leaned too close to greet me at the breakfast table, and upon my Aunt’s insistence, I said good morning; and smiled for the first time in three weeks._

_If I did not love him, then, I was at the very least_ _in_ _love with him. _

_I must have known, with some pre-emptive unconscious part of myself, that Michaelis was not his real name. In truth he came to me nameless, a clean slate alias, and though he had given his name as Sebastian Michaelis, that name was not christened to him until_ _I, myself _ _spoke it aloud._

_I never learned who he was before he arrived on that late train; but in my arms, he was always Sebastian._


	2. Chapter 2

There is a loose step near the third landing, second from the top, which creaks every time it bears weight and gives the peculiar feeling of weightlessness that preempts a fatal fall (though the unfortunate guest who forgets to avoid the stair generally only receives a small tumble and a bruise for their trouble). This morning, Ciel is dragging his feet in his Sunday best when the high heel of his saddle shoes (navy and eggshell, pointy-toed, in the young girls’ style) catches on the offending step.

He had thought to complain his way out of going to church with Auntie Angelina, but will later confess he hadn’t intended to take such drastic measures. So, a portrait of the boy and his guardian angel, that stubborn inky black stain on the Dalles house:

The tutor’s hand is sickly fish-white cut intimately across the grey wool of his pupil’s vest, clawed near the buttons, a cornflower flash of his coat lining fluttered out as he’s caught. And being held by him feels like flying, feels like--

The movement is nauseating. His ankle throbs dully, and his feet are no longer on the floor. Michaelis _caught_ him, yes, but he moved without Ciel seeing him at all, hadn’t realized the man was even following behind him on the stairs.

He’s held against Michaelis’s chest with care, a perfect magazine cover of a man carrying his sweetheart. Ciel’s uncovered eye is wide and glassy, pupil blown wide in the inexplicable moment before his surprise turns to irritation. Michaelis smiles, curved-mouth and closed-eyes, his eyelashes dark and long. It’s always genuine, when he smiles, and that alone is enough for Ciel to mark him as _deceptive_. (It does not occur to him at the time that perhaps he is simply unaccustomed to this brand of kindness, and by the time it does he has seen behind the curtain of the man enough to know better.)

“Be _careful_ on the stairs, my dear. We wouldn’t want an accident, hm?” The admonishment, even playful as it is, strangely does not make his skin crawl. Ciel scoffs anyway, and finds his hands clasped loosely behind Michaelis’s thin neck.

“I don’t have to be careful,” comes Ciel’s hot response. He turns his head away, dismissive or avoidant. “You’ve caught me.” _And you always will_. Is it strange to have such certainty in that? Ciel is--he refuses to allow himself to become attached, some days too late. “I’ve twisted my ankle. You ought to have moved faster.”

An echo of the kitchen, _don’t disappoint me_. Michaelis’s eyes are open and curious when Ciel glances back to him, and against the sleek ink black of his hair and dressing gown the irises look starkly red.

“Of course,” Michaelis says smoothly, deferently, obediently, and then they say nothing interesting to each other at all. They don’t have to. As though they are of the very same mind, Michaelis spins Ciel’s excuses to skip church _for_ him, in front of Aunt Angelina, and Ciel, and God himself. There is a strange familiarity that pushes at the boundaries of their relationship, an intimacy too out of place for acquaintances and too improper for a student and his mentor. Ciel identifies this, and promptly puts it out of his mind.

That Sunday morning, if Ciel does not gain a friend then at the very least he gains an ally who is content to be used as Ciel wishes.

It is, as it turns out, significantly easier to convince his aunt he must stay home from church when he has an accomplice. And even after Angelina leaves, Michaelis remains with him: On the couch in the living room, in full view of the windows, with Ciel’s legs thrown over his lap. His black silk dressing gown feels cool against Ciel’s bare legs, feels like a cool breeze of air in the oppressive red walls, red curtains, red cushions. He’s holding a cold compress to Ciel’s ankle, stockings long removed, when Ciel stretches himself out over the rest of the couch restlessly.

“Basil,” Ciel informs him when he can’t take the boredom anymore, matter-of-fact and dry as though he _isn’t_ simply attempting to elicit a reaction from unflappable Sebastian Michaelis, “was in love with Dorian Gray.”

He’s rather too satisfied when this gives Michaelis reason for pause.

“In the romantic fashion,” Michaelis clarifies politely, unaffected and unemotional. His hot fingertips ghost over the tender skin at Ciel’s ankle. “That is rather--”

“Vulgar. I know.” Ciel sighs, and tips his head back over the arm of the couch, eyes closed. “The book was used as evidence against Wilde when he was tried for sodomy, wasn’t it?”

“You’ve done your reading.”

“Yes,” Ciel agrees listlessly. “Said as though we’re discussing my lessons. I wasn’t aware this was part of my home-work.”

“It isn’t,” Michaelis promises, and his thin palm presses flat over Ciel’s leg. “That would be quite inappropriate, wouldn’t it?” And the way he speaks, a promise and a secret, _I won’t tell if you don’t_. Permission to continue, permission to entertain this unseemly whim of Ciel’s. He hums thoughtfully, a low pleasant noise from the back of his throat, and then continues: “How can we say he was in love with Dorian, and not simply enamoured with him _aesthetically_?”

Ciel sits up abruptly, eyes narrowed, and peers across the couch at him distastefully; Michaelis is smiling again, head tipped to one side. “Because--” Because he was young, and beautiful.

“ _T_ _he world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold_.” But Michaelis’s voice, even as he quotes the novel, is cool and pitch black. His palm slides up Ciel’s leg, fingers curling just short of the knee. The gesture is innocuous, and likely unconscious. It has to be. “ _The curve of your lips rewrites history.”_

If Ciel is affected, he does not allow the reaction to see light. Even so, something unpleasant pulls at his lips. He is left with the unsettling and not entirely unwanted impression that Michaelis is, or _could_ be, speaking to him, and it feels… like trying on a coat that doesn’t fit quite right in the shoulders, like trying to fit into someone else’s skin.

“Aesthetic or romantic,” Ciel is clipped and unforgiving, “the effect remains the same. That is to say, Basil is obsessed with him. Have you finished my poem?”

He hasn’t, of course, but Ciel isn’t confident that Michaelis would tell him if he had ( _"I really can’t exhibit it. I’ve put too much of myself into it.”_ ), and so Ciel must be content to be plied with a recitation of someone else’s poetry. It’s Wilde, of course it’s Wilde, that immoral and immortal artist whose sins Ciel should be too young to familiarize himself with. And halfway through the second part of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ , book of poetry held aloft in one of Michaelis’s slender hands and his other at Ciel’s knee, the cold compress falls to the wood floor with a wet sound. Neither of them reaches for it, neither of them acknowledges. Ciel is laid out across the couch again by the time the last verse sounds, beautifully rumpled in his Sunday best, head against the armrest, the curve of his lips parted.

Perhaps there was a moment in the spaces between each line, something passed between them that ought not to be acknowledged. In a way, isn’t it he who’s inciting this? With his talk of Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray, with the way he carelessly draped his legs over Michaelis’s lap, the aesthetics of the thing, _because you are made of silver and sapphire_ , or so the book doesn’t go.

“ _I_ _n Reading gaol by Reading town--_ ”

Ciel barely hears his voice, so unimportant it is to this _thing_ between them. The grey wool of his shorts, too hot for the June weather, have hiked up a few centimetres, enough that he can feel the cool black silk of Michaelis’s dressing gown on the pale underside of his bare thighs.

“ _\--In a burning winding-sheet he lies, and his grave has got no name--_ ”

He misses the entirety of the next verse. Something something, lie, sigh, die, _the man had killed the thing he loved_ , the specifics are simply unfortunate background noise in the thin air of the room.

“ _\--And all men kill the thing they love, by all let this be heard--_ ”

What Ciel has incited is this: Michaelis’s hand crawling above the knee, his fingers edging under the hem of Ciel’s shorts, and the scar on the back of his left hand visible to the light.

“-- _Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word--_ ”

He does not dare move, nor sigh, nor open his eyes, for fear the gossamer threads he’s spun entrancing Michaelis to him might break. The offending hand creeps higher, higher.

“ _\--The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword._ ”

Any excuses for their physical proximity cease with the end of the poem, but even so, even so...

Ciel feels, if not in control, then at least victorious. Something hot claws at his insides, and if the wake of the poem leaves him with any truth, it is this: If Michaelis wants him, it is only because Ciel wants him to. He could ask for anything in this moment, trap Michaelis here forever with his hand on Ciel’s thigh, reciting the same poem again and again.

“Sebastian--”

The phone in the hall rings. Once, twice, three times, and to his misfortune Ciel is left alone on the couch in his rumpled suit. The call, as it turns out, is a request for Michaelis (and Michaelis alone!) to come have tea and do some shopping with Aunt Angelina and Mr. Liu; robbing Ciel of his company and leaving him the rest of the afternoon alone to brood about the empty house. Michaelis is dreadfully proper when he returns with Aunt Angelina for dinner, as though their morning on the couch was simply some isolated fever dream of an incident.

Michaelis leaves his bedroom door at the end of the hall open after dinner, and so Ciel promptly retires to bed and shuts _his_ door in response, a reactionary and useless punishment.

 

♚♚♚

 

Perhaps Michaelis had a precursor. Should the thing be more palatable if Ciel had loved another wayward boy-child at say… eleven, twelve? In that same June heat, at a camp no-one wanted to attend, removed enough from society that no one simply cared.

His cabin-mate, who Ciel would describe as no less than incensing, inconsolable, and immoral, was easily enchanted. He smiled with too many teeth, but his hands were hot where they fell on Ciel’s thighs. He was, in a word, _experienced_ , and that was initially what drew Ciel to him, as he might be drawn to a hefty text that might prove an equal wealth of information.

On the handful of occasions they laid together, Ciel might have thought he saw something devilish in Alois with his spun-gold hair fanned out like a brilliant halo around his head. Those echoes of something demonic every summer were enough, momentarily, to satisfy whatever it was Ciel found himself desiring for in those twilight years of early adolescence.

He takes what he can, from pretty Alois Trancy, but finds himself still watching the adult men counsellors when they pass by in the summer heat, finds himself still watching Mr. Liu when he returns home; and in that sense, he has learned nothing at all.

 

♚♚♚

 

“Sebastian.” _Se-bas-ti-an_. His shame and his secret, four syllables, whispered in the dark with too much tongue and teeth. “Sebastian.” Ciel takes himself in hand behind that closed door, deceptively experimental, as though this hasn’t been a permanent fixture in his life for all of two, three weeks. Mr. Michaelis this and, Mr. Michaelis that. It could be a harmless teacher crush, perfectly understandable, were a few things different:

Were Michaelis a woman, of course, or were Ciel some errant schoolgirl himself. Were the thing _unrequited_ (because in the dark solitude of his bedroom and the dark solitude of the house Ciel rarely ventures outside of, it is too easy to acclimate himself too well with the only other shadow who lurks against the red-wallpaper backdrops, damascus rose and painted panelling, while his aunt is out and the maid makes herself scarce).

In the dark solitude of his bedroom, Ciel can convince himself that he has seen something like a hunger in Michaelis’s face, _that moment_.

And later, he might go so far as to pretend that moment, the couch, Sebastian’s hand on his leg, _lie sigh die the man had killed the thing he loved,_ was the genesis of this sick thing that’s wound itself so tightly around his insides. Later, he might pretend--

Forget about that heat-drunk day at summer camp in miserable June of last year, and the year before, forget about Alois Trancy a year older than him who’d needed little convincing under those weeping trees around back of the cabins. Forget about touching, being touched, forget about any sexual awakening that didn’t arise from _him_.

Equal parts vindictive and obsessive. Ciel handles himself too harshly, strokes his cock with a coldness and methodology too efficient to be particularly enjoyable. That is fine, for his purposes; it’s not what he’s trying to accomplish here. _You ruined me_ , he could tell Michaelis later, as though he wasn’t already ruined, _sexually promiscuous,_ it doesn’t matter. No one would know the difference, would they? _He ruined me,_ Ciel could say to Auntie Angelina just as easily, and Michaelis would be gone before the other shoe hits the floor. One more ex-tutor, and another trick up his sleeve for future reference.

It is, like so many other errant thoughts of Ciel’s, simply an indulgence of other moves he might make. Ciel is a chess player, and like any good strategist, he must fully evaluate all moves before picking up his pieces. (Nevermind that Auntie hasn’t had time to play with him in weeks, not since...)

“ _Sebastian_ .” And outside, on the third landing, the hallmark tapping footsteps of Michaelis's dress shoes herald his nightly wanderings. Down the stairs and back up them, pausing outside his own door and then, of course, there is Ciel’s. Floorboards like so many chess squares, the board is set out, now _choose_.

He has left his bedroom door shut tonight, still Sunday. Well, here he is again, in miserable June, sweating at the brow with his pale thighs spread apart. He has been nothing if not shameless, and _fuck_ Alois Trancy. It’s too hot to play.

Sebastian, _Sebastian_. He is Michaelis in the daytime but on Ciel’s lips, he is always Sebastian.

There is something strangely irreverent to the whole thing. Ciel never returned the book, sleeps with it under his pillow, and so Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece is hard and uncomfortable under his head, when he tips his head back curved-lips _the world is changed because you are_...

The floorboards creak, outside. In his mind’s eye, the Sebastian he calls Sebastian pauses just on the other side of the door, and perhaps he feels entranced to it by so many carefully manipulative gossamer threads Ciel spun around him in the heat-drunk Sunday morning, not quite broken by the telephone call. Perhaps, if he has spun them just right, this thing won’t have to be visibly incited by Ciel at all. _You ruined me, Sebastian, you--_

That would be the pretty conclusion to it, after all. Wind him up and watch him go. Basil was never in love with Dorian, but obsession runs both ways. Phantom hands creep up the inside of his thighs, and Michaelis’s footsteps echo away down the hall as, on cue, Ciel’s feverish mind unravels in a repetition of Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian.

 

* * *

 

**two.**

_You didn’t even have chance to think of your books, and I expect our possessions have all been seized by the police back in California by now. I ought to make you promise me another copy of that book, the same edition, the same red cloth binding. I’m tired of the colour red. I loved that book. In the meantime, I have attempted in every intimate moment since to recreate the missing verses of that poem, as I remember them through the terrible distraction of your still-wandering hands:_

In Reading gaol by Reading town,  
[indistinct] shame,  
In it lies a wretched man,  
Eaten by a flame.  
In burning winding-sheet he lies,  
And his grave has got no name.

Until Christ there call forth the dead  
Something let him lie  
Something something tear,  
Something something sigh  
The man had killed the thing he loved,  
And so he had to die.

_I don’t think I ever got it right._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my wonderful beta Ollie for continuing to put up with me talking about this fic for hours on end! (And threatening bodily harm after I posted the first two chapters unbetad, whoops.)

If a shift occurs in their relationship as a result of the encounter on the couch, it is subtle enough that Ciel does not feel it in any significant capacity while he is in Michaelis’s company. He is ever the same both after hours and during their lessons, which, while decidedly unsatisfactory, does not move Ciel in one direction or another.

He follows the thought, one overcast morning while half-listening to Michaelis instruct him on the proper usage of adverbs in Latin, that perhaps the Michaelis he had possessed in that languid dream-like Sunday morning was not Michaelis, but another Sebastian indeed more real than his tutor counterpart. Another Sebastian whom Ciel had bent so carelessly to his whims, banished by the ringing telephone but retained as an imprint in Ciel’s heat-drunk memory.

This would be the _safest_ thing for all of them; Ciel, and Michaelis, and whatever wayward Sebastian he has seduced and now holds captive. He has played this game once before; sweltering June, a chessboard in the parlour, Mr. Liu’s hands imagined vividly in the places Michaelis had touched so effortlessly. Liu’s eyes are very dark, says it’s too hot to play, and Ciel soon grows bored of a game with no opponent. Yes, this would be the safest thing for all of them. Ciel; and his conjuring of Sebastian; and Mr. Liu who was too smart to play; and Michaelis who has moved his pieces without asking the rules.

Ciel is a demanding child; and he has never met a man as acquiescent as Michaelis. Anything within reason, anything he wants, and… how far can he _take_ that? Plenty of things outside of reason, too. Michaelis has him translating poetry, _Reading Gaol_ from English to French to Latin, and back again. Lie, cry, sigh, die; and the trial men and the hangmen and the guardsmen. The rhythm of the thing doesn’t translate well.

Michaelis hasn’t touched him since Sunday.

They have done nothing to each other, propriety and common sense intact, secure. Michaelis has done nothing to risk his job, nor repercussion from the law, and Ciel will still be comforted at night by his conjuring of the phantom hands of that other Sebastian; coaxing his knees wide apart, perhaps, or else slotting his fingers in the hollows of Ciel’s ribcage.

This would be the safest thing for all of them.

“It’s too hot to study.” But Ciel is a demanding child, pushes his chair back with an awful scraping sound on the wood floor. The world ought to be far less interesting when Michaelis has stopped talking; but Ciel ceased paying attention to him long ago in favour of _Sebastian_. (Se-bas-ti-an.) “I can’t pay attention to my lessons today. Come sit in the garden with me.” And Ciel will not be denied. Even Michaelis has rolled up his shirtsleeves, regardless of his deferent nature.

Were he of the mind that Michaelis might have a shot at keeping pace with him in the heat, Ciel might have instructed him towards a chess game in the parlour instead. But here they are, standing out of place in the garden, nocturnal and pale-skinned.

Michaelis’s face looks waxy in natural light, stretched too tight over his cheekbones. His nose is too big and his chin is too small, his eyelashes too dark and thick on the bottom. Ciel’s hand curls in the crook of Michaelis’s bony elbow, fingers edging up under his shirtsleeve. Ciel’s knees (already pink from the sun) knock together when his heel catches in the dirt, and Michaelis makes a comment about his aunt’s lilies. Pretty, pretty things. He closes his eyes when he smiles, a tension around the brow, and _oh_ , Ciel thinks, oh. Notices it only under the sunlight, in the heat, the pair of them somewhere they don’t belong. A smile is an easier thing to fake when the eyes are hidden.

Ciel’s aunt is at the back door then, of course. _These are my lilies_ , after she’s taken Ciel’s place at Michaelis’s elbow--

“Beautiful,” Michaelis says about the lilies, stationary with his hands in his pockets, Angelina already bustling off to the next flowerbed. “Beautiful,” Sebastian says, and gives Ciel an open-eyed smile, just the barest curve of his lips, that nearly freezes Ciel in place as he sulks his way back to the comfort of the house and its imaginings. This is the safest thing for all of them; Ciel, and Michaelis, and Sebastian, and Mr. Liu, and Auntie Angelina.

 

♚♚♚

 

With the heat follows the fire. It’s hot when he goes to bed and it’s hot when he’s woken up; smokesick and still on fire, wearing the skin of some other dead boy, mattress dipped under the weight of someone laying next to him, _Ciel isn’t here anymore._

The room is stiflingly hot but the hand on his forehead is burning. “You’re having a terrible nightmare, my darling.” It takes a long time for him to see Michaelis’s face at all, but something constricts inside him when he does. The silhouette of him cut clean in the dark, eyes reflected glowing and pinkish from how the streetlight slivers filtering in through the reddish curtains cast over his face.

The rest is grey in the dark. The room is out of focus. It is the first time, Ciel thinks before he is awake enough to think, that Michaelis has been inside his room.

So something has ahold of his insides, and Michaelis’s eyes are red in this light. _Don’t touch me, do not touch me_ , but he just can’t say it. The hand to his forehead slides down to cup his cheek. If it takes a long time for him to see Michaelis’s face, it takes longer still for him to move.

“Sebas… tian.” Lamely stated, a mumbling drop off at the end. Ciel blinks his wide eye, and realizes with a sick feeling in his stomach that he has not worn the patch to bed. The thin sheets are tangled around his legs, and his pillow is wet. Michaelis’s hand doesn’t dislodge when Ciel pushes himself upright. Michaelis’s eyes want to soften, but the light won’t let them.

“You were--”

“Screaming,” Ciel fills in blandly, closes his eye and sets his jaw. “Yes. I know.” His face is still wet, and he can imagine Michaelis peering at him with due concern in the dark, doesn’t have to look. _Sorry I woke you,_  he doesn’t say, because he’s been sleeping to the sound of Michaelis pacing the stairs and the landing for weeks. “I’m perfectly fine now.”

Michaelis’s thumb presses into his cheek and slowly, slowly, he caresses it over the ugly mass of scar tissue that sits where Ciel’s right eye should be. A phantom ache, Michaelis’s thumb drawing the perfect curve of an imaginary lower lash line, as though wiping away a stray tear.

“Is there anything,” and there is something strangely harsh to the temper of Michaelis’s usually soft voice, something dark and raw to reflect the room and the stuttered streetlights, “I can do for you?”

Ciel should not shudder like this. The fingers of Michaelis’s other hand trace circles into his thigh through the sheets. Michaelis’s silk dressing gown feels cool against the patches of skin the rumpled sheets don’t cover. Too hot to sleep, too hot to dream, too hot to do anything at all.

“Ciel?” Michaelis prompts, pressing his palm flat against Ciel’s leg, and Ciel kisses him then.

It is a dishonest thing. Michaelis’s lips parted from the question, Ciel’s neck cramped from how far he has to lean up into him; and the hand clawed around his thigh, a grip sudden and harsh enough that it will leave a bruise tomorrow.

It is not an innocent thing. Ciel forces his tongue into Michaelis’s mouth like they both know Michaelis has no say in it one way or another. _Lie back and think of England, darling,_  but his mouth is open and hot and unnecessarily permissive, and his teeth are very sharp when Ciel pricks his tongue on them.

Michaelis allows this much, allows it all until Ciel strains the fabric of his dressing gown clumsily between his fingers, and then _gently_ , so gently, the hand on Ciel’s cheek slides down his neck to find purchase at his shoulder. And Ciel finds himself eased away, a firm resolution. _Not tonight_ , Michaelis’s permissive mouth says, and _not tonight_ his eyes say now. Their pinkish hue has faded, shifted out of the streetlight glare. Whatever mad thing was between them, whatever nightmarish state, has passed but not left them entirely.

“Haven’t you ever kissed anyone before?” Ciel asks, derisive and unnecessarily cross, mouth wet and frowning.

“Never,” Michaelis tells him very seriously, and nearly hits his head on the shelf above the bed (crammed with stuffed animals, all brand new and untouched, all of his aunt’s choosing) when he leans back against the wall.

“Liar,” Ciel whispers, and crawls those few inches across the bed to perch on his lap. “You can’t expect me to teach you _everything._ ” Michaelis’s dressing gown is cool to the touch but his skin is still hot, and Ciel rests his cheek in the hollow of Michaelis’s sternum.

His hands settle easily on Ciel’s back, fingers slotted perfectly in the bony protrusions of Ciel’s spine, and that’s more telling than anything. “Is there anything,” Michaelis repeats with a clarification, voice rather normal now, “that I can do for you to help with the nightmares?”

“Stay with me,” Ciel says, “until I fall asleep.”

And he does.

 

♚♚♚

 

Ciel is wearing Michaelis’s handprint under his shorts when they eventually come to meet the next day (Sunday, no lessons, Ciel herded off to church and Michaelis shut in his bedroom when they return). Which is to say, when Ciel successfully shimmies the lock open by wiggling the doorknob repeatedly for the better part of five minutes straight. The lock never worked properly on that guest room, and he wonders if Auntie Angelina ever bothered to warn Michaelis about it.

Michaelis does not even bother looking up from his writings when Ciel slams the door open against the adjacent wall, and then shut again. Ciel is in a bit of a _mood_ today, and Michaelis’s non-reaction only serves to draw his ire. This can be rectified.

“Auntie sent me to bring you down for afternoon tea,” and Michaelis _finally_ looks at him when Ciel makes a little hop up to sit on the writing surface of Michaelis’s desk. He crosses his legs at the knee, a pronounced motion, and taps the side of his shoe against the arm of Michaelis’s chair, barely resists the urge to roll up the hem of his shorts to display the pretty purple blemishes Michaelis’s fingers had left on the skin. “Are you planning on avoiding talking about this _forever_ ?” Half a day is, after all, practically a lifetime when you’re thirteen and overconfident, and impatient, and _everything_.

Michaelis leans to the side, drops his pen and spreads his spidery fingers flat over the journal page he’s been writing on. If Ciel sees a spark of irritation in him, it does not carry to Michaelis’s voice. “I’m afraid you’ll have to clue me in on what we’re not talking about, my dear.”

“Oh, just that you’re _queer_ , is all,” and another non-reaction is unacceptable so Ciel leans in a bit too close, an ugly curl of his lips, and adds flippantly as an afterthought “ _and_ that you kissed me, _Se-bas-ti-an_.”

There is a moment where they don’t talk, filled only with the flickering candlelight against the blackout curtains and the stuttered rhythm of Ciel’s shoe tapping against Michaelis’s chair. A moment where Ciel _has_ him, and the lines between Mr. Michaelis and his captive conjuration of _Sebastian_ have blurred until the two are no more distinct than a man and his reflection.

Then, Michaelis turns away with a little shake of his head, closes the journal’s cover and locks it in the top right desk drawer. “Your aunt,” he says, not unkindly, “has asked me to marry her.”

 

* * *

 

                    **three.**

_The self-proclaimed discerning reader might assume that my Aunt’s lack of appearance in these pages is due to some ridiculous (yet understandable) desire on my part to preserve her memory, purposefully exclude her from such an unpleasant and immoral account of that summer’s events._

_I did not care much for my Aunt, nor do I think she cared much for me. At best, I was an inconvenience, and a stark reminder of the losses of both her sister, and her own unborn child. I can’t blame her for that. I do believe now, several years removed from the events I’m writing about, that she did the best she could with the circumstances she was handed._

_I could easily paint a grotesque picture of her in these pages; but ultimately my Aunt’s fatal flaw was not her lack of parenting, nor our strained relationship, nor her misplaced fondness and confidence in Sebastian Michaelis. No, the sin she committed was behaving exactly as any usual person would; and perhaps being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were very careful, my Sebastian and I. She missed nothing, as there was nothing to miss._

_In truth, I have not written much of my Aunt because her presence was largely irrelevant past being the cause of Sebastian and I meeting; which was, after all, chance. She could have hired any other man for the position. And Sebastian, my Sebastian, so thoroughly eclipsed her and everyone else in our company. For those few summer months we spent at my Aunt’s house in Ramsdale, it was as though no other person existed but the pair of us, and the masks we were so determined to put on for each other._

_There would, of course, be casualties as a result of our obsession. Even so, had I known then what I do now, I still would not have cautioned my Sebastian against marrying her._


	4. Chapter 4

After the initial spurning of his advances (in the light of Michaelis’s new engagement to Auntie Angelina), Ciel begins to keep, perhaps inspired by Michaelis’s own secret writings, not a physical diary but a mental catalogue of events. His actions, and Michaelis’s re-actions. Upon further consideration (he takes two days for this, which his aunt describes as sulking and Michaelis mentions not at all), the engagement becomes not an obstacle, but a potential asset.

He is never certain  _ what _ has gone on behind closed doors between the two of them, but is certain enough that it is nothing at all. Something about the whole affair seems strange, transactionary, motivated by other means. What that is Ciel cannot say, but he is not yet hopeful enough to consider any option save that Michaelis is after Angelina’s money. (Angelina’s motive is decidedly unimportant.)

The more interesting piece of their encounter in Michaelis’s bedroom, then, is  _ not _ the engagement but rather Michaelis’s refusal of Ciel’s advances. For how passive and acquiescent Michaelis has been thus far, it rings uncharacteristic and hollow. Perhaps, something to do with the secrets always lingering about the lines around his eyes.

A different approach, Ciel decides, is preferable to pulling back entirely. If he is confident in one thing, it is that Michaelis will not come to him, and if he wants a thing done right then he must do it himself.

_ Thursday.  _ Very hot day but overcast, a terrible mugginess in the air. There is a temptation to rush the thing, to wait ‘till evening and feign another nightmare as some feverish excuse to crawl into Michaelis’s bed; a good enough excuse, Ciel thinks, and then they won’t have to speak at all which would lessen the burdens of his seduction immensely. But being so obvious again so soon after the previous nighttime attempt runs the risk of compromising Michaelis’s deferent nature; if he is forced to take a decisive stand, the game will become far more difficult than necessary. Michaelis stays in his bedroom today, and Ciel resigns himself to watching and waiting (however much his impatience itches underneath).

_ Friday.  _ Hot again today. Observing pays off; Ciel discovers that when he ventures outside to the garden or the porch to cool off in the shade, without fail Michaelis will trail after several minutes later with a book in hand. Even with Auntie Angelina at home, Michaelis seemingly prefers Ciel’s company over that of his bride-to-be. They discuss Wilde further in the garden, and Michaelis’s book is abandoned on the porch never to be retrieved.

_ Saturday.  _ Angelina remarks on their closeness over the breakfast table, and leaves little room for conversation given that she then proceeds to lament on how  _ troubled _ of a child Ciel is, and describes in far too much detail how each of the tutors that came before Michaelis quit. Feigning embarrassment, Ciel sinks down in his chair and, under the table, knocks his shoe against Michaelis’s. He worries his breakfast spoon in his mouth, once he has been granted Michaelis’s eyes on him. The metal clinks against his teeth, lips parted, and Ciel drags his tongue deliberately over the edge of it. A familiar hard tension settles around his red eyes, and Michaelis excuses himself swiftly. He does not follow Ciel to the garden today, but instead draws back the dark curtains in his back-facing room and watches intently from the window.

_ Sunday.  _ Hot and overcast again. It takes little convincing on Ciel’s part to beg off going to church today, as preoccupied as Angelina is by something or other. He retreats to the garden once her red car has rolled down the driveway, complaining loudly about the heat. Michaelis sits on the porch and pretends to read while Ciel strips off his shoes and coat and vest on the lawn. The book is entirely abandoned when Ciel makes the stubborn and uncharacteristic decision to lay with the lilies under the sprinkler in the remainder of his Sunday suit. If there is indeed a shyness or reservation in Michaelis, it has met its match in the way Ciel’s white shirt clings transparent to his ribs when wet.

He leaves his bedroom door open when he strips of his wet clothes, later, his back pointedly to the doorframe, and if there is an imagining of footsteps that linger in the hallway, well. Michaelis’s door is shut when Ciel finally ventures outside, and that’s as good as anything.   
  


 

♚♚♚

 

The wedding passes with as little flair as expected when one party is a widow and the given relationship is so transactionary and toneless that “behind closed doors” even seems as an exaggeration. It is a courthouse affair, a loveless thing, and it rains all day. The air outside is unbearable.

Ciel skips breakfast and spends much of the morning in bed feigning a stomach ailment. He is in the washroom when Michaelis catches him in the act, guilty-faced, gagging stubbornly around his own fingers in his mouth (no  _ use _ in doing a thing halfway, there’s no use).

Michaelis is wearing white gloves with his wedding suit, and he smiles at Ciel with open eyes when he closes the washroom door behind himself, more cruel amusement than anything; and it makes Ciel’s skin crawl, it makes a flush of shame creep unpleasantly up the back of his neck.

“I’m  _ not _ going,” he insists, after he has pulled his hand reluctantly from his mouth, and finds himself backed against the tub. “You can’t make me, and Auntie  _ certainly _ can’t.”

“Not to worry,” Michaelis says brightly, and Ciel’s hand still slick with saliva is very suddenly caught by Michaelis’s gloved fingers. “Your secret is safe with me.”

He presses a dry kiss to Ciel’s forehead and draws a gloved thumb slowly over his wet bottom lip — and Ciel thinks, then, that perhaps he has miscalculated.

 

♚♚♚

 

Rains all day, rains all night, and the humidity and the heat wants to make him feel  _ sick _ where he’s been pretending so stubbornly, even after he has been left alone in the house. Ciel stretches out on the couch in the sitting room in his white nightgown in full view of the windows, and waits.

He dozes off, somewhere around the third humming repetition of  _ Reading Gaol, _ words he can’t quite remember murmured back to himself like a lullaby, like counting sheep. It’s too hot to sleep.

And after it has gotten dark, he watches with half-lidded eyes as the doorknob turns and slowly creeps inward. He watches, in a convincingly dreamlike state, as Michaelis does not carry his aunt over the threshold but rather trails dutifully behind her, like a well-minded beast. Michaelis leaves his shoes at the door, conscientious of the sleeping child, where the click of Angelina’s heels might have woken him had the door not already. So quiet he might as well have not been there at all.

His Aunt takes no notice; but when Michaelis passes by on the way to the stairs, he places his thin palm briefly over the crown of Ciel’s head, not quite an affectionate gesture, and remarks: “The poor boy must be sleeping it off, he was so very ill when I saw him this morning.”

Angelina replies with something he does not remember, and Ciel waits fifteen minutes half-conscious on the couch before creeping up the stairs after them. 

What he finds, or wants to find upstairs is obscured by the rain and the sound of his own creaking footsteps. That he might find Michaelis’s bedroom empty, abandoned for Angelina’s on the second floor. That after the wedding, for a time he might find the freedom to return to his own Sebastian; the one so effortlessly captured all those Sundays ago and promptly discarded.

That after the wedding, for a time he might find it in himself to curl up in Michaelis’s dark bedroom, kept museum-like. Cannot say why he wants to do so, and nor why he knows he would find little comfort in the imaginings after all. ( _ Here his cool black dressing gown, here his feverish white hands. And the Sebastian who loves him back is sick, and the Sebastian who loves him back shares the same countenance of something demonic that had existed in pretty Alois Trancy the last summer and the last summer before. _ )

Ciel does not stop on the second landing, does not creep down the hallway on his toes to stand in the shadow of his aunt’s door like a precocious schoolchild in wait of some horrified glimpse at what mother and father get up to at night in the dark. The thought of his Sebastian  _ in bed _ with her rather than simply in bed with her rings as improbable as it is nauseating.

He hears no noise from the stairs at all, and continues in that slow oscillation upwards into the hot recesses of the top floor of that red house in Ramsdale, all peeling crimson wallpaper and dust columns.

There is a flood of flickering candlelight cut across the floor in the hall, bedroom door open where it should not be. Ciel feels like a ghost traversing those last few feet to Michaelis’s room; white nightgown, feet so silent on the floor he might as well not be there at all, and the air feels…

“Ciel,” Michaelis says from his spot at the bed, reading under the covers with his glasses dipped down to the very tip of his long nose. And Michaelis looks up when Ciel shrinks against the doorway, his hands working the hem of his white nightgown in some nervousness he can’t reason out. “What can I do for you?”

He’s wearing a black nightshirt with silver pinstripes, and his bony wrists look sickly white where they poke out from under sleeves slightly too short. As sickly as Ciel feels.

“I couldn’t sleep downstairs,” and if the mumble is characteristic to his supposed ill state, Ciel is happy to consider it an act. Perhaps it ought to be with caution that he enters the room, draws a slow wobbled path to the bed. “You woke me up when you came in.”

“Goodness,” Michaelis sets his book down and there’s something— _ expectant, _ about that. “We can’t have that, can we?” He stretches his long white hand out for the candle on the nightstand, and blows it out at the same moment that Ciel sinks down on the edge of the bed. His bedroom feels cooler than the rest of the house, and Ciel wants to shiver on the duvet. And Michaelis sounds… no, not expectant, but reserved.

He clenches his jaw, releases, sighs very softly. “You knew I was going to come up, that’s why you left the door open.” Not quite an accusation, things they should not give voice to. An open door is an invitation, a closed one is a punishment. Ciel’s voice is flat and very dry. “I  _ thought _ you would be with Auntie.” Michaelis’s black silhouette is very close in the dark.

“And how fortunate it is for you that I’m not,” Michaelis tells him, and it is half a tease, until Ciel feels a static hand at his waist, cool through the white fabric of his nightgown. There is a consideration to  _ push _ , to take this nervous scene into his own hands until the nerves are no more and he can push at Michaelis’s flesh until he becomes something more palatable in the dark, less  _ Michaelis _ and more  _ Sebastian _ ; but something in the heady afterthought of smoke from the candle mingled with Michaelis’s cologne feels too fragile to take in hand. “Sick children ought to be coddled, don’t you think?”

“Sebastian,” Ciel starts, unsteady on the duvet, and Michaelis kisses him then.

A dry, perfunctory thing. A closed-lips press that lingers on his open mouth. He does not incite anything further, and is not incited in return. Ciel is left when it is over with Michaelis’s hand on his hip and the distinct impression of being  _ consoled _ by it, the kiss as a holdover, a token for his affection.

Ciel casts forward, rests his forehead in the dip of Michaelis’s collar, and hears Michaelis’s murmur from above him: “Not tonight, I think.”

It’s dismissive as expected, though Michaelis does not say anything one way or another when Ciel crawls under the sheets. They say nothing to each other at all, and so Ciel finds himself spending the wedding night with Michaelis in his aunt’s stead. 

In the morning, Michaelis’s cold arm is still curled around Ciel’s back, and his white nightgown is bunched up around his hips, leaving exposed the phantom handprint on his thigh where a bruise once sat.

  
  


♚♚♚

 

Auntie Angelina and her new husband do not sleep in the same room. They arrive at the breakfast table separately, and retire to bed at different hours. They share nothing at all, and Michaelis’s dark bedroom remains occupied much of the day and night. He leaves his door open in the evenings and pretends to read on the patio during the day. He has shown no interest in Angelina’s money so far as Ciel has overheard, nor does he seem interested in performing those duties befitting of a husband.

Everything remains much the same in that house in Ramsdale, and at night Ciel bottles up the eyes on his back, presses his face into his pillow, and  _ wonders.  _

(He nicks a half bottle of Michaelis’s cologne from the washroom and measures a few careful drops onto his pillowcase at night. Buries his face in it, door open and back arched under the thin sheet when he touches himself. 

_ On the couch, with his pale thighs spread apart and his head tipped against the armrest. His lips are parted and he sighs languidly when Sebastian’s fingers, delicately, shyly, stroke the length of Ciel’s hardness through the grey wool of his shorts. He has to be coaxed to go further, though they say nothing to each other at all. He likes it when Ciel forces his hand under the fabric; and after it is too hot for Ciel to excuse still wearing his shorts, Sebastian likes it when Ciel winds fingers in his black hair to force his head down, too. _

_ Sebastian, Sebastian, Se-bas-ti-an.  _ This is the safest thing for all of them. But no matter how much he repeats the refrain, there are no footsteps on the landing outside his open door tonight. Ciel takes his imagined Sebastian and when it provides comfort no longer he discards it, like a childhood toy once-beloved and now unnecessary.)

 

* * *

 

**four.**

_ Thursday. Very hot day. Overcast and humid. Taking advantage of the lack of sun, I wanted to go outside without risk of burning. (The discomfort of a sunburn might have been tolerable for the exchange that I could have paraded around the house in little but drawers and an undershirt, skin pink and exposed. Perhaps I could have asked him to rub aloe onto my back. But, as it were, I would need the rest of the week to work up the boldness necessary to undress in front of him.) I asked my Sebastian to come out into the garden with me, but he declined, citing working on his writing. I stayed inside. _

_ Friday. Hot again. Sunny. I asked, this time, if my Sebastian would come sit on the patio and read to me as I lounged about in the shade. He did follow me outside, although the book was soon abandoned. I never caught the title, nor was it ever picked up again. I played a very distracting little faunlet, which of course was by design. Had my Sebastian not looked at me with intent before that Friday, by the end of it I had him regardless. It matters little whether he was predisposed to such perversions before we met, as it was of no consequence in the game I played with him. I would not be refused. _

_ Saturday. Slightly cooler. Overcast. We had an incident at the breakfast table. I made rather a fool of myself that resulted in my Sebastian excusing himself prematurely to, I presume, take care of the problem in his trousers I so clumsily incited by mimicking obscenities with my tongue and the silverware. My Aunt suspected nothing. My Sebastian did not follow me to the garden today, and the curtains of his room were closed whenever I cared to glance up at the house. _

_ Sunday. Hot. Very sunny. After my Aunt left for church, I went to the garden again; and performed a test to see if my Sebastian would follow without being asked. He did, and I understood then that given the effort and consideration I might have a well-trained beast on my hands soon enough. Hand-fed and tame, my poor Sebastian, my starving pet. He took the scraps I offered him in the garden that day, sitting under the sprinkler with my white clothes on. Later, I stripped myself of the sodden, useless things with my bedroom door open into the hall. And he stood, at the corner on the top of the staircase, just out of view and watched. I put on a very good show, that day, and if his closed door was any indication I had given him yet another trousers problem to care after for the second day in a row.  _


End file.
